1. Field
The exemplary embodiments described herein are directed to systems and methods for interacting with displays, and more specifically, for detecting and acting on multiple people crowding on a small display for information sharing.
2. Description of the Related Art
Present systems require manual actions to connect with public displays, such as connecting the device using appropriate cables, or utilizing BLUETOOTH manually to interact with public displays. In the latter systems, the user has to manually initiate the interaction by sending commands to the public display and by changing the name of the Bluetooth device. The device used by the user behaves passively until the user commands it to transmit to a public display by the user initiated interaction. Due to the passive nature of the device and interaction with the public displays, the present systems did not utilize any other components of the devices (e.g. such as cameras or crowd detection), to interact with the public display.
Present systems also utilize methods for detecting more than one person in front of a large display. The purpose of such systems is oftentimes to detect when people wish to interact with the large display, and the detection is centered on detecting people facing the display. Some systems use multiple-person identification and tracking to decide how to divide up a TV-display depending on how many people were attending the display. Some systems utilize an algorithm for multi-person tracking and include a module which detects faces in the video stream and distorts them. Interactive displays that showed different content depending on the person's proximity to the display also exist. Such interactive displays can take into account if several people were attending the display. However, the present systems are focused on clusters of people attending the public or large display, and are not concerned with clusters of people not attending the large display (e.g. being engaged with a different device away from the large display).
Face detection for detecting if multiple people are attending a display has been done for security purposes by present systems. Such systems include software to prevent shoulder surfing (when somebody is attending a screen over the shoulder of the user without the user's knowledge), which uses face recognition to blur content on the screen if the rightful owner is not attending the screen. Such systems thereby attempt to hinder information sharing rather than to promote it.